5 Books Every Sports-Crazy Kid Should Own

If you are concerned that your child is lagging behind in the reading department because he or she is spending all her time playing sport one way to raise their interest in reading is to provide them with a sport-themed book or two.

Victory School Superstars Series

This is actually a 23 book series of chapter books based on a variety of sports with a reading age of 6 – 8 years. Each book includes a life lesson using sports as the means to teach the reader things like how to play fairly. The series are produced by Sports Illustrated Kids. You can choose to give your child the ones related to his or her own favorite sport or have them read the entire series.

Playing with Purpose

Faith-based, this is a series of books for young adult readers and focuses on the lives of famous athletes and their faith. The stories use famous athletes as strong role models for young people, and illustrate how important faith is in a person’s life, even famous athletes. While football, basketball and baseball-themed the lessons to be learned about sport and faith and ‘playing with purpose’ make these a good read for any sport-crazy young adult.

Who Was? Series

This large series of books are for reading ages 8 – 12 years and written by various authors. These are non-fiction books that will provide a sport fanatical kid with lots of history and interesting facts about some of the most famous athletes throughout modern history. Almost every kid has a sporting ‘superhero’ and with dozens of books to choose from there is a strong likelihood that your child’s sporting hero will have his or her biography included in this series.

Throw Like a Girl

Reading age 10 years and up. While this book has been written to inspire confidence in young girls the book is equally suitable for boys to read, as it teaches them that girls can participate and compete in sports just as well as boys can. This is a valuable lesson that both boys and girls should learn from a very early age, and it is very well taught within the pages of this book.

Big Book of Who series

Produced by Sports Illustrated Kids, this is a series of reference-style books. Most are focused on one particular sport but there is also an All-Stars book for children who are interested in more than one sport. Reading ages 5 to 18 years.